Across the Wine-Dark Sea
by The Housekeeper
Summary: Or, Three Years in the Life of MacKenzie McHale. She sends herself away. She sends herself away, her own angry god, and she forbids herself to think of the Greek word for homecoming.


––––––––––––––

_And if again some god shall smite me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it._

_._

She was not born into a time when women waited at a high window, eyes cast out to the sea,_ in their lonely splendour, heavy in their idleness, enacting the sad story of hope abandoned_. For most of her life, MacKenzie thinks this is a good thing: she is not made of grace and beautiful tragedy, not made to watch the sea foam up against the sand in the light of an empty-horizoned dawn.

She sends herself away. She sends _herself _away, her own angry god, and she forbids herself to think of the Greek word for _homecoming_: _nostos_, the arriving home after a long journey. Whence comes _nostalgia_, bitterest of all the herbs.

"Did you know," she says to Jim, one day as they drag their equipment and their heavy bodies through the mountains in the growing dark. It is cold, and dry. She forgets, sometimes, the touch of warm rain in the night, the taste of thunder on her tongue. There is a smear of dirt on the pocket of Jim's shirt, which is stained at the armpits; her shirt is actually his, too, and she has had to tie it to stop it from getting tangled in the sharp angles of her knees, and now the cold air is working itself into the gap between shirt and waistband, until she is shivering. They walk over a lunar landscape, like no place on earth, between scrubby plants she cannot name. Her teeth chatter, and she imagines the misery in her throat is escaping a little bit at a time, a particle breaking off for every click of tooth on tooth. "Did you know that nostalgia was originally a medical term used to describe homesickness, which at the time was believed to be a physical disease specifically afflicting Swiss mercenary soldiers in World War One?"

She is too busy breathing to go on, so she does not tell him that military physicians hypothesized that nostalgia was caused by damage to the ear drums inflicted by the clanging of cowbells in the mountains of Switzerland, to which the soldiers, faced with the flat and unending plains of France, lowland fields torn to mud and trenches and scarred with gunfire and artillery shells, longed to return. Cowbells in the night, at the ending of the day, when the sun goes down. The sound of bells in the clear air, calling them home after a long journey.

"No," says Jim.

MacKenzie thinks, too, of Odysseus, who loved his long war and who loved the wide world, struggling to return to the wife he loved second to all and second to none. _Nostos_. Which in Old English took the form _nesan_ and meant to escape, be saved, survive. To be remembered by a woman waiting at a high window, which MacKenzie was glad, as a young woman, that she was too plain and too much of the world to be.

Now, later, as she lies in a cave and cannot sleep, and thinks instead about how far she has travelled, how long she has run, and wonders how much she will make herself endure until she feels that she has paid penance, and whether at the end of that endurance she will still be alive to feel a weary relief – later, she is glad for another reason entirely. She now knows that she could not be one of those women.

She would have not enough heart to wait for the sea to give up its tired secrecy. She has no heart for it, no heart for anything, no heart at all.

––––––––––––––

_And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice?_

_._

She takes with her to the Middle East a paperback copy of _Jane Eyre _that she's had since college, the Penguin Classics edition, well-thumbed, the corners softened and bent, the spine broken in and split with white lines where the colour has worn away with many openings. She reads it constantly, though not in order: Jane leaves Rochester, and then the young Jane is asleep when Helen Burns dies, and then _Reader, I married him_, and then she sees the madwoman in the attic. MacKenzie knows the story too well to be comforted by following it straight through. Still, she has read every page three or four times before they come home.

Jim asks about it, finally – asks why Jane Eyre, and why pages four-eighty-three and five-fifteen are marked with neatly turned-down corners. She shrugs.

"What's it even about?" he asks. "I've never read it." They are sitting on adjacent cots in a temporary Marine base in Fallujah. A dull thunder from far away, and the reflection of security lights in his eyes. The ground shudders, like a dog in pain.

"The rehabilitation of a depraved man," she says. "And faith, and the transubstantiation of the body into the soul. Also, Gothic Romanticism's conception of femininity, and also social class and its role in the marriage plot."

Jim pauses. "Thank you. That really cleared things up."

MacKenzie sighs. Outside, a group of Marines are taking a smoke break, and she hears them laugh. One of them stamps down on a butt, hard, his boot grinding it into the dry ground. The smell of cigarette smoke, tar and tobacco, almost makes her forget the burning smell beneath, the chemical scent of gunpowder, the way that dust is coating her nostrils, will be in her lungs forever. Jim has gone back to editing footage on his laptop, leaning over it with hunched shoulders and spine.

"Prayer," she says suddenly. "It's about the uncertainty of ever reaching anyone you're speaking to, so that all communication is like prayer. About how, every time we talk to each other, it's a matter of faith that anyone will ever hear us."

Jim looks up. His face is shadowed, the harsh light outside sending the sharp shadow of his nose across the length of his cheekbone like a black-sailed ship curving around the edge of the world. "Why this book?"

"We're out here –" she starts. "I sometimes feel like we're out here screaming, just screaming about what's going on. I don't know if anyone is listening. I haven't always…" She thinks of Will, of the way she spoke to him last: of the way she spoke, like she was praying he would understand. He took on faith, every night, that the audience was there, although he could never see them. The same way people talk to God. "At the end of the book, Rochester calls for Jane, and across all the miles in between, all the tangled woods and heaths of England, and despite – despite everything that's happened between them, she hears him. She hears him."

Jim looks at her for a long moment. "Okay," he says.

She thinks this is the end of the conversation, until, a few minutes later, he breathes in and asks, "What does she say? Jane. When she hears him, the guy – I forget his name – what does she say?"

MacKenzie flips to page five-fifteen, and reads, " '_I am coming: wait for me;' and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words, 'Where are you?'_ "

"Okay," Jim says again, quieter.

He will never tell her that when she is stabbed, across miles and woods and heaths and oceans, across deserts and through cities, and under baking foreign skies and a crowd and a riot, she calls for Will. She calls: _Will. Wait for me_._ Will, where are you?_ with her voice breaking and her eyes blind, and Jim is never sure whether he wants to believe that Will heard her or not.

And MacKenzie: MacKenzie knows, on most days, that Jane Eyre ran from a man who lied, who wronged her even though – even because – he loved her. She is not Jane; MacKenzie knows, every day, the weight of guilt. But when she walks into the newsroom in New York, for the second first time, the only thing she knows is that Jane came back to a broken man, blind and crippled and lost in darkness.

When she speaks to Will of _a place people come together_, she is speaking to someone she isn't sure is still there.

She says, _We can frame that debate, _and what she asks is, _Will,_ _where are you?_

––––––––––––––

_...where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages… the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina._

_._

Afghanistan is, in its way, a beautiful country. In anyone's way, really. In the spring, there is a flush of verdant green that turns the steep-edged hills into meadows, wildflowers pungent in the grass. In the mornings, mist seeps up from the ground in the mountains, spreading itself over glassy-eyed lakes with silver skin. The summer sky, metallic blue and bronze-edged with heat, has a perfect plainness, easy on the eye, _like a table on which nothing is set, like a table which is not yet even a table_.

She and Jim are on the road to a village in the mountains. It's September, and the air is chilling as they work their way higher, but for the moment they are stopped while the Marines they're travelling with change a tire on one of the Humvees. The road is two feet deep of mud, and the soldiers are relaxed enough to try to shove each other into it. They look like young boys, smearing gobs of mud across their faces and rubbing dirty hands in each other's hair, and MacKenzie tries hard not to think about the fact that some of them may have still been in high school a few months ago. It's too nice a day: the sun is soothing, warm enough on her skin that she's pushed up the sleeves of her shirt.

She leans back on her elbows on the rock that she and Jim are sharing – which involves her sprawling over it and Jim balancing half of his tailbone on one corner. The sky is blue, blue, and MacKenzie waits for the earth to turn over and spill her into it. She looks at the mountains not far away, turning gold and bronze and fiery with the season. Closes her eyes and listens to the soldiers. They sound like school children, and the air smells like sun-warmed earth.

"There are worse places to be," she says, and feels Jim go tense beside her.

"Not many," he says, but gently, and she opens her eyes to look at the sky. It's so blue, she thinks. It's so blue I could have made it up.

––––––––––––––

_High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl_…

.

Jim's that way with her often – gentle. Before she is stabbed, even, and then after. Not like she's fragile: she would have sent him home if he had been like that, or not have taken him in the first place.

He's gentle the way one is gentle when rubbing frostbitten toes to warm them, or when touching two fingers to the cheek of a mourner lost in thought, or when waking someone from sleep: drawing them back, slowly, to the world of the living.

He does, in fact, wake her up in the mornings. She has trouble sleeping, the beat of her heart too loud, too insistent, and she startles out of sleep during the nights, so Jim is nearly always the first to wake. At first, he just says her name, several times, leaning close and quiet, and she begins to associate the heavy weight of morning sleep with a gravelly, "Mac. Mac." But they're gone for weeks, and then for months, and then for years – two _years_ of "Mac, Mac" and no coffee, of coming to the morning in caves and barracks and tents and cots and bombed-out houses and holes in the ground. And Jim starts to rest his hand on her shoulder, or brush her hair out of her eyes, gentle, gentle. Pink mists and bronze sky and his touch on her face, on her neck, on her skin like the brief landing of a paper crane.

(_Morn_, she remembers, may come from the same root as the obsolete verb _mere_, meaning to refine, to purify, _mere_ itself deriving from the Sanskrit meaning _particle of light_. Turned by the tongue into the Greek _to sparkle_; in Russian, _heat haze_: the daybreak, refining its own light. But no morn can purify her, no watery sunrise wipe the sin from her; she thinks of this, years later, when she tells Don that the breaking of God's law can never be undone. Still, she wonders if she stayed so long in a land that felt so close to the sun and the sky, so close unto the morning, to see if one more turning of the Earth could finally wash her free.)

Once, they're in a town called Farah, at the end of a road in the mountains, and the air is cold, cold. She has burrowed her nose into the blanket, and her throat is thick and scratchy with a night of breathing the frozen air, and MacKenzie is tired. Mortally tired. She feels she will die of it soon, and as long as the death is like this, like sinking beneath a warm blanket with the cold outside, she thinks she would welcome it. Jim's thumb is warm against her cheekbone. "Mac," he says. "Come on."

She groans, shakes her head like a small child afraid for school to start. "Mac," Jim says, amused. "Hey, it's snowing. Want to see?"

"Snowing?" She lifts her head a little, and frowns. "We can't leave if it's snowing."

"Probably not for a few days," Jim agrees.

"Then why wake up?" she asks, letting her head fall down again. "Jim," she mutters, clutching his hand, the one that is not still cupped around her neck, thumb still stroking along the line of her cheekbone. "Jim, back to bed," and she pulls him down onto the cot behind her. Sleep, she wants sleep so badly, the blankness and the forgetting, a few more hours in which she doesn't have to fight so much to be in the world. Where there is an easing of _the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks_, an easing, an ease.

Jim gives a little exhalation of surprise, and hesitates, and then MacKenzie feels him slip under the covers as he lets himself be pressed up against her in the tiny cot, his nose nuzzled into the knobbly vertebrae of her neck, breath stirring her hair. She lets go of his hand, reaching back to hold onto his t-shirt, soft with many washings and nearly worn through because neither of them expected to be gone for what is now a year and a half and a riot and a stabbing and two winters and four IEDs and a lifetime of mud and sleet and sunburn and she wants, so badly, to sleep.

She must say that last out loud because Jim touches her neck again and says, "Sh, Mac, it's okay. Just sleep," and she thinks that Jim gives permission the way other people give forgiveness. He is warm behind her, heating her through the cotton of their clothes.

Later, he wakes her again, and they get a ride with a shepherd's father, riding in the back of his pickup for four hours, wet through and freezing in the snow as dark falls. He wakes her as he always does, and just as she always does when he is gentle with her, she lets him call her to the world. _Such stuff as dreams are made on._ And she comes, slowly, allows herself to be drawn on through dusky halls towards the morning of consciousness, because she has nowhere else to go.

––––––––––––––

_You dozed, and watched the night revealing  
__The thousand sordid images  
__Of which your soul was constituted;  
__They flickered against the ceiling.  
__And when all the world came back…  
__You had such a vision of the street  
__As the street hardly understands;_

.

She didn't leave right away.

Well. That's a lie: she leaves right away (she will never, as long as she lives, forget that last night, but she also tries, as long as she lives, never to recall it) but she doesn't send herself into a war immediately. Only after the better part of a year spent carrying around the heavy chains of guilt does she turn them into the chains of self-punishment in an attempt to lighten them. So that she can, maybe, one day, breathe without the feeling of iron pressing on her lungs.

First, she travels. In Italy, she is caught in a thunderstorm in Siena, and drives the rental car back to Florence, cold and soaked, clothes heavy, in time to watch the lightning flicker over Tuscany, the sun shine out against the purple-shale clouds and transmute the emerald hillsides into stained glass. In Vienna, she sits in an all-night café with a melting whiskey just to hear the old men at the next table argue over their chess game. Always, she has found that listening to a language she cannot understand is soothing, like the sound of voices and glasses clinking downstairs when you are a child tucked into bed during a dinner party, _the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room_.

In Paris, she drinks red wine from the bottle on a stone wall overlooking the Seine and watches the way the streetlights and glowing windows reflect on the dark water. It's a mild night for October, and lovers pass by with their hands on each other's cigarettes, fingers tucked into each other's back pockets. Young people, laughing and throwing their lit cigarette butts, like red fireflies or quick-dying stars, into the black river. MacKenzie swirls the wine in her bottle and thinks about how the ancient Greeks didn't categorize colour based on hue, but rather on saturation: thus, the sea, dark as wine, dark as oxen, was more akin to blood than to the watery blue of a bright winter sky.

There is a lot of dark sea, a lot of blood, between her and Will. She thinks that, on this earth, there is not enough ocean for her to cross so that she may run far enough from him to forget.

She looks down at the water and the couples below her, thinking that maybe her reflection will be distorted enough to look like two people, but all she sees is a stubbly man who stands with his head tilted, exactly the way Brian does. She takes a gulp of wine. _Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh_.

She leaves Paris in the morning, in the back of a cab whose windows fog over. She leaves Paris, with its gray unblinking streets sparkling with frost in the empty dawn, and pretends that the city (city of light, city of lovers) does not yap at her heels like a pack of disappointed hounds.

––––––––––––––

_Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep… as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing._

_._

In her emails to him (unanswered, all of them, and she wonders if talking to God really is anything like this, and if it is, how anyone can pray without crying), she apologizes, over and over. She takes responsibility, over and over, hoping that one day, saying, _It's my fault. I did this,_ will not feel quite as much like taking on the dead weight of a broken man and the dangling remains of his shattered life.

She does not beg. Begging is not intended for exiles. Begging is for people with a last, desperate hope, and MacKenzie may be getting shot at in three different nations, but hope is a country she crossed long ago.

––––––––––––––

_Desire is a principle of selection. Who wanted _feet_ in the first place?_

_Who wanted to stand up? Who felt like walking?_

.

She is stabbed, and they leave.

Correction: they leave Pakistan. And go back to Afghanistan.

She tries not to notice the way Jim looks at her, not with accusation but with pity. She learns to hide her wince when she lifts the camera, stitches pulling and, beneath, a deep hurt. The scar will ache for the next two winters they spend here, swelling with the cold rains.

They do not go back to Pakistan, but they do not go home. MacKenzie is afraid of home in a way that she has never been afraid of the wars. All her life she has been told she has courage: no one ever told her it was of the wrong kind.

They stay. Until Jim is shot.

_Shot _may be an overstatement. He is grazed, in Kabul, the bullet tracing a red-hot line across his flank and hip. It is deep enough only for seventeen stitches and four butterfly bandages, but his knees buckle and he sees MacKenzie afraid, as he has never seen her afraid (she knows better: she has been afraid for two years, just of the wrong things) and when he tries to press his hand against the hot flow of blood, she says, "Jim, Jim," over and over again.

It's early summer, hot, and dusty in the roofless shell of a house in which they have taken cover. The dust catches the sunlight and settles on the threads of the worn-through carpet under his feet. The gunfire is loud outside, and the sunlight is quiet in the dust.

"I'm fine," he says, and does not know what to do. When she was stabbed, she slung her arms around him and let him drag her to the corpsman, making jokes to keep him breathing, to keep _him_ breathing, while her face got paler and paler. "I'm fine." He reaches for her hand and presses it to his chest so she can feel his heart beating, beating.

MacKenzie catches him as he collapses, with a long-limbed eloquence, from his knees to the ground, and lays him down on his uninjured side and presses an extra shirt against his wound.

"I'm fine," he says again, feeling sick with shock, and she smooths his hair back and lets him shake beneath her fingers. He closes his eyes, but he can still see above him how the dust dances quiet in the sunlight. "I want to go home," he hears himself say.

MacKenzie's lips brush his forehead. "I know," she says. "We will. We'll go home now." _From what season had they fallen, from what idea of grace had they strayed? _He feels her hand come to rest once more against his heart, beating bravely on.

When the gunfire dies away, MacKenzie drapes his body over her shoulder and half-drags him out to a corpsman, him hobbling along on one leg only some of the time. That night, he must lie on the wrong side of his body, his hip throbbing with fire, and it forces him to face towards MacKenzie. He feels her gaze on him, and then, when he could be asleep but isn't, she puts her hand on his chest again, and he opens his eyes.

"We'll go home," she says. "It's okay. We're going home."

"Mac," he starts. "We don't –"

"I'm sorry, Jim," she says. "I really am."

"_Mac_," he says again, and it seems easy suddenly, so easy, to take her in his arms and draw her to him, feeling the edges of each of her ribs beneath the fabric of her t-shirt (_his _t-shirt, he realizes). His hands don't meet each other where they're wrapped around her waist, but it's close. "Mac, there's nothing left of you," he whispers, and he means it in every way.

"I know," she says. "_The sad story of hope abandoned_," she says, and he kisses her because he can't figure out why she sounds so afraid.

––––––––––––––

…_because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth._

_._

When she comes home:

and it no longer feels like home, and she buys a new apartment and new furniture for it, and she wakes up sweating in the night without recognizing a single object in the room, and she forgets, once, which subway line she needs to take and has to look it up on her phone

when she comes home, she cannot find a job. So when Charlie Skinner calls, it is like a miracle, and not only because of her state of unemployment. It is a second chance, she can't help but think – and why should she not? Will must want her there, if Charlie Skinner is calling. Will must want her. In the dark, she listens to the traffic on the street below her and thinks this is a second chance.

It isn't, of course. Will does not want her. And she should have known, because she is the one who took herself out of his life, out of life. Once without him knowing it, and then again, as far as she could go, across the wine-dark sea. Only to reach this point. This twisted homecoming, _nostos_: like bitter ash, like a dry river, a rusted nail. There are no second chances, not for her.

She breathes in

_in New York I also breathed: and as if for the first time_.

and knows the taste of exile.

––––––––––––––

.

**Notes:** This fic borrows liberally from some very great works, including The Oxford English Dictionary; Homer's The Odyssey; multiple poems from Mark Strand's wonderful book Almost Invisible; Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; George Eliot's Middlemarch; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Tempest; T.S. Eliot's Preludes and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Mary Ruefle's poem Naked Ladies; Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude; and e.e. cummings's i-six nonlectures.


End file.
